Trump's radioactivity

Victor Davis Hanson writes, …

orthodox politicians often lose when they try dueling with the unorthodox Trump on his terms—and then, making matters worse, they end up doubling down with more emotional heat.

Furthermore, in 2016, part of Trump’s message was that an overrated coastal elite played by stuffy rules of comportment to hide both their incompetence and hypocrisies. For Trump, the best way of radiating the establishment was saying anything to anyone at any time anywhere—especially by inventing schoolyard nicknames that savagely captured an opponent’s perceived weaknesses and flaws — and begged for a reply in kind.

…But the pundits forgot a few other key reasons why the radioactive Trump melted his opponents. In every one of Trump’s jousts, he was coiled and reactive—a fact known to his base who defended Trump’s fallout on the basis of ‘they started it, he finished it.”

Second, Trump’s personal invective was part of a larger assault on institutions and their representatives who were increasingly perceived both as hostile to half the U.S. population and hypocritically self-interested. Because there was merit in his coarse criticism, Trump’s opponents found themselves reactively defending the scarcely defensible. Being outraged at Trump often led them mistakenly to be outraged at his policies.

Globalization before 2016 was seen only as a positive gift. It certainly was often salutary for most in the world—but not always for many Americans. Received wisdom held that outsourcing and offshoring were good for the American economy. Meanwhile, companies fled the United States. More regulations and bigger government seemed fated. Free trade de facto was considered fair. Trade deficits like budget deficits were nothing much to worry about—even as middle-class wages stagnated, the red-state interior was deindustrialized, and the victims were written off as losers, deplorables, irredeemables, and clingers who foolishly had not prepared themselves for the coastal “knowledge based” economy of the “information age.”

In response, half the country—the more important electoral-college half—felt that the way politicians had treated their middle-class, post-industrial malaise was insincere and merely palliative. Then Trump came along and offered searing radiation treatments designed to kill the metastases shortly before it poisoned the rescued host—by loudly promoting seemingly archaic ideas like bringing back capital and jobs from abroad, deregulating the economy, lowering taxes, and making the United States more fossil-fuel independent.

Something similar happened abroad. Most of the world’s signature establishment institutions beneath the veneer of their polite nomenclature and mannered protocols were ethically, or at least administratively, compromised. The United Nations often proved itself to be an anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic organization, masquerading in tony Manhattan as the voice of global morality, subsidized by the American hosts it routinely attacked. The European Union was evolving into an anti-democratic statist project warped by German mercantilism and German cultural and political dominance on matters of finance, immigration, and foreign policy that brooked no dissent. Postwar NATO members had mostly ignored their commitment to spend 2 percent of their respective GDP on defense to share the burdens of defending Europe more equitably. Europeans had come to assume that protecting Europe was more important to Americans than it was to Europeans. The point is not that these heralded institutions are unnecessary or incapable of reform. Rather, to change they often need the sort of toxic criticism that Trump levels because they have consistently ignored more polite and diplomatic badgering from world leaders.

But Trump is also more than a needy egoist or anarchist. Like it or not, he sees himself on a “make America great” crusade that entails radically redefining American tax policy, the regulatory federal octopus, immigration enforcement, trade protocols, the fairness of the international order, the transparency of media coverage—and the very language and manners in which past pathologies were downplayed. His tweets, his televised rallies, and his blunt press-conference repartee share that common theme: What the establishment calls normal and salutary is abnormal and toxic, and the only way to treat the cancer is with radiation—at least until the medicine kicks in, the patient improves, and voters see tangible improvements in their daily lives.

Most of the elite write Trump’s message off entirely because they perceive him as toxic. But the more interesting moral and intellectual question is why more polite politicians did not do much, or never much worried, about the hollowed-out interior of post-industrial America, the effect of illegal immigration on entry-level job wages, or the deleteriousness of the growing federal regulatory bureaucracy on struggling small businesses and individual freedom.

A final thought. Trump’s radioactive invective left enemies on the campaign trail, and during his first-year efforts to enact his agenda, in a permanent meltdown. To the degree he pivots occasionally and lets his solid policies speak for themselves, his still seared and exasperated enemies nonetheless remain permanently red-hot—even as Trump seems to be cooling down and reasonable. Patients usually do not keep damning the side-effects of past therapy once their health improves, but rather slowly begin to acknowledge its utility.

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